American imports and exports totaled $285.8 billion in January, down about 20 percent from the same time a year ago, the Commerce Department said Friday. The falling trade levels underscored the broad economic contraction occurring in what the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, described as the worst financial crisis since the Depression.
Although the United States is sending less in goods and services abroad, import levels have fallen far more steeply, reflecting the slide in oil prices as well as lower consumer spending. The trade deficit, a measure of the gap between imports and exports, shrank for a record sixth consecutive month in January, narrowing 9.8 percent to $36 billion.
Imports fell 6.7 percent, to $160.9 billion, in January from a month earlier, while exports fell 5.7 percent, to $124.9 billion.
"It's a reflection of a worse situation domestically and globally," said John E. Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia in Charlotte, North Carolina. "When we have weakness here, we cut out importing all those wines from Chile, and food from abroad and imported clothes, and a lot of those discretionary items."
The trade numbers came as some of the largest U.S. trading partners were reporting even starker rates of economic contraction and drops in trade levels.
In China, exports plummeted 25.7 percent in February as the country's output of everything from toys and fashion products to metals and grain slowed. The Japanese government reported last week that Japanese gross domestic product shrank at a revised pace of 12.1 percent a year in the fourth quarter, reflecting a 13.8 percent plunge in exports.
Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at the research company MFR, said that the gap between imports and exports was likely to narrow even further as the United States weathers a prolonged economic decline, and Americans increase their rate of personal savings and pare their spending.
"It will not represent good news to trading partners who have much spare capacity that had been used to produce mountains of products for the U.S. consumer," Shapiro said in a note.
In another report, The Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers said its preliminary index reading of confidence for March edged up to 56.6 from 56.3 in February.
